Michael Kaethler continues his Pedestrian Experiments series, in which he discovers Buenos Aires on foot using the concept of psychogeography. This time he takes us on a wander around Chacarita.
Rat going through a maze. (Photo: Melissa Baldwin)
One of the fathers of 20th century psychology, Edward Tolman, claimed that psychology boils down to what makes a rat turn left or right in a maze.
But what about the human turning left or right in the city? What does this infer about how we interact with cities, how we find our way, consciously or unconsciously through these labyrinthian structures?
Wayfinding is something that has captivated me since moving to Buenos Aires. Despite the fairly consistent grid system, I have lost my bearing on numerous occasions and my partner has frequent bouts of spatial disorientation.
According to current navigational theories, some of us rely on a compass bearing and navigate accordingly, relying on, for instance, ‘east and west’ to find our way around. However, others rely on cues that cannot be geographically categorized – typically, landmarks, thus finding their way by linking together identifiable objects, ‘right at the Baroque church, follow till abandoned building, and left at the red apartment.
Arguably, Buenos Aires is not a great city for navigation-by-landmarks. Straight proportional streets, discrete churches, and scant public squares add up to a fairly cue-less landscape, making it quite plausible to walk the same street several times without knowing it.
Google Map of Buenos Aires showing one orientation.
And if you’re the type who navigates through compass bearings, Buenos Aires can also prove confusing. Why are there so many maps of the city rendered according to different axes? After a simple Google image search of Buenos Aires Map I located at least 5 maps aligned to different axes (north/ west/ north by northwest etc…). I suppose this is why it’s common to avoid using bearings to discuss navigation in Buenos Aires. It’s so much easier to just say ‘down Santa Fe towards Retiro’ than to have to figure out if your mental map has a north-south axis or some mutated variation.
But this is all digression. The purpose of this walk is not to wayfind or navigate but the opposite. I am seeking to get lost, allowing my spatial senses to blur and fade out, in order to better take-in my surroundings and allow them to guide my ‘lefts and rights’.
Abe, a friend visiting from Canada, and I decided to get lost in Chacarita, a part of the city I had had no experience of. We wanted to test out the purest form of psychogeography’s derive (drift) - the completely aimless stroll. Up till now my pedestrian experiments have used constructed drifts to explore the city, such as walking Linea D of the metro, walking home from the airport and walking in the shape of a crucifix between places of worship in Palermo. This drift was intended to enable us to lose ourselves within the city.
39 bus in Chacarita (Photo: Francis Mariani)
At random we exited bus number 39, unaware of our location and began to walk. It was within a minute that we realized the challenge at hand; we stood at an intersection and couldn’t decide which way to go. Should he decide, should I decide, should we vote, how do we proceed? What does it mean to be aimless when there is another person? If we both don’t have aims how do we decide where to go?
We stumbled through this process, bit by bit. As we grew less conscious of decisions and eventually found a rhythm with both our walking and with each other, our decision-making became increasingly fluid.
The truly aimless walk was first pioneered by the French Surrealists in the early 20th century. They took the practice of automatism, which, like automatic writing, they applied to walking and thus set locomotion free from consciousness. Through dispassionate strolling, they sought to discover places that have no reason to exist but simply are; through this process they stumbled upon odd juxtapositionings, coincidences and embarked on unplanned diversions.
As Abe and I ambled onwards, I began to spot the developing patterns in our choices of direction. At crossroads, there was a clear trend of choosing to venture into areas that were partially covered or obscured, whether by foliage, a turn in the road, or an obstructing building. Curiosity and intrigue were throttle and steering wheel. Green areas such as small parks, abandoned lots and informal parks led us onwards. Graffiti and abandoned buildings stopped us in our tracks; we investigated closer, pried through fences and pondered over building’s fates and the messages conveyed in spray paint.
The aimlessness evolved into wonder. The places we passed through were full of narratives, nearly all of which were out of our reach. At one point we came across a large concrete foundation with nothing more than a single dilapidated wall left standing. Upon closer inspection, we found a tiny laminated note on the wall, which simply stated that at a previous time this was a helado factory. Abe and I were transfixed with this idea, we tried to visualise what it would have looked like, how the neighbours interacted with it (free ice-cream being snuck out from the backdoor?) and the impact of its closure.
Some of the seemingly insignificant sections of neighbourhood that we passed, such as the abandoned lot or rusty bus shelter, may in fact retain a lot more emotional value to the block’s inhabitants than the majestic town hall down the road. But this is not recognised, accepted, or valued. We are surrounded by countless informal public monuments; each one has an impact on our lives and yet they commonly remain unrecognised and under-appreciated.
Guy Debord, one of the founders of psychogeography, believed that through the aimless stroll it was possible to identify emotional zones in the city. Psychogeography, as he saw it, was a pure science enabling identification and distillation of urban ambiances.
From our perspective, it would take a lot more walking to achieve something like this in Chacarita. In many ways, the identification and distillation that was achieved was an internal one. It required an effortful switching off of the intentional button, turning down the pragmatic dial, and listening to the dialectic between the surrounding space and ourselves.
The surrealists saw the derive as playful aquiescensce to the subconscious and the Situationists mixed submitting to the unconscious with radical politics. Abe and I mixed exploration, wonder, and hunger. It’s hard to deny the extent to which both our conscious and unconscious was guiding us towards streets where it would be possible to find a hearty lunch. It’s hard to be aimless when hungry.
Abe felt that by taking away the objective behind the endeavor, his senses were heightened and he was able to extract the extraordinary from the banal. Indeed, drifting brought us face-to-face with places and situations, which were curious, out of our control and novel. Being lost helped with establishing a sense of wonder and purposelessness.
Over a period of six hours and covering 13km, we nearly completed a full circle.
What makes a human turn left or right in the city? 99% of the time it’s to achieve an objective, go to work, meet friends, buy food etc… The other 1%, from Abe and my experience, tends to be propelled by the city itself subconsciously guiding us left and right by its spaces of imagination, curiousity, and wonder.
